Design has a long tradition in Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, Peter Behrens designed products, posters and buildings for AEG, the electrical goods firm. In 1907 the Deutscher Werkbund was founded with the purpose of promoting the “refinement of working life through the combined influence of art, industry and the craft trades”. The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and which existed until 1933, became world famous. The same is true of the Ulm College of Design, which was founded in 1953 by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill. While it initially followed in the footsteps of the Bauhaus, it soon pursued concepts of its own and set internationally acknowledged standards for design during the 15 years of its existence and strongly influenced many prominent designers.

For many years, the name Braun was closely linked, especially abroad, with the concept of German design, which combines functionality with complexity and technology. Braun design was largely defined by Dieter Rams. Other German firms set and indeed still set styles with their products: Wilkhahn in Bad Münder and Vitra in Weil am Rhein for furniture, Lamy for writing implements and Erco for luminaires.

In the information age, the importance of design in creating new media is assuming an ever greater role. Apart from the aesthetic dimension while deciphering complex information, design plays an important intermediary role between IT advances and the cultural and social developments.

The German Design Council advises and supplies information in matters of design to trade and industry, cultural institutions as well as the public. One of the focuses of its activities is presenting German design outside Germany. On behalf of the Federal Minister of Economics and Labor it awards the “Federal Prize for Product Design” and on alternate years the “Federal Prize for Design Promotion”.

In addition to the German Design Council there are a range of other design institutions in Germany. Among the most important are the International Design Center (IDZ) in Berlin, the “designcenter” in Stuttgart, and the Essen-based Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The interests of designers vis-à-vis the political sector and the public are represented by the German Designer Forum, which among other things constitutes the Design section of the German Arts Council, the umbrella organization of the federal arts associations.

After World War II, both East and West German cinema dealt with the national disaster (“The Murderers are among us”, 1946, by Wolfgang Staudte, “Marriage in the Shadows”, 1947, by Kurt Maetzig, “Between Yesterday and Tomorrow”, 1947, by Harald Braun). Very soon, however, in line with the contrasting political developments in the two halves of Germany, the two went their separate ways.

Predominantly conventional films deprived of political impact (“Heimat” films as they were known) but with occasional cabaret-style references to it (“Wir Wunderkinder”, 1958, by Kurt Hoffmann) were affiliated with the period of successful economic reconstruction in western Germany. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that cinema in the Federal Republic began to blossom artistically. In the mid-1960s, for the first time “new German cinema” emerged, in which young filmmakers, taking their cue from the “Oberhausen Manifesto” and assuming that “conventional German cinema has collapsed”, put forward a new art form in 1962. It was untrammeled by convention and commercial pressures. This new style of film embodied a change of generation and a new aesthetic approach. Experimental attitudes, formal ambitions and a critical stance towards society characterized the “auteur films” by Alexander Kluge, Jean-Marie Straub, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Reinhard Hauff, Rudolf Thome, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Theodor Kotulla, Peter Fleischmann and Christian Ziewer.

The most creative and productive of these filmmakers was Rainer Werner Fassbinder (died 1982), who focused on the oppressed individual and the innate contradictions of German history, expressing these in a diversity of forms and stories. Borrowing from melodrama, Fassbinder took the cinema limelight with major narrative films such as “The Marriage of Maria Braun”, 1978, “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, 1980, “Lola”, 1981. Fassbinder won the “Golden Bear” at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival for his film “Veronika Voss”.

In the 1980s, the filmmakers of the New German Cinema increasingly enjoyed commercial and international success. In 1979, Volker Schlöndorff won the “Palm d’Or” in Cannes for his film version of Günter Grass’s novel “The Tin Drum” for which he also won an Oscar in Hollywood in 1980. In 1984, Wim Wenders was awarded the “Palm d’Or” in Cannes for “Paris, Texas”, and in 1987 he surprised the film world with his fantastic “Wings of Desire”.

The prize for Best Director in Cannes in 1982 went to Werner Herzog for his sensational film “Fitzcarraldo”, which used an exotic setting to depict the drama of a manic individual. Margarethe von Trotta, commenting critically on the situation in the Federal Republic, made a name for herself with her impressive portrayal of women in films such as “Leaden Times” (1981) and “Rosa Luxemburg” (1986).

In spite of such successes however, New German Cinema did not continue to flourish. With the waning of the social criticism of the 1968 student-revolt movement, the discursive film lost its political background and in general “auteur films” did not establish a stable economic base for themselves which could withstand the onslaught of commercial American films.

Films in the GDR were produced by the monopolist company DEFA. The latter was financed and controlled by the state and subject to the political goals of the Party. It produced propaganda films of all genres. On the other hand, artists attempted to avoid party dogmas.

This constant fluctuation between departures for something new and being defeated can be witnessed in the films produced by DEFA. They offer a panorama of the time, full of contradictions, yet they give rise to concrete images of life, artistic subjectivity and outstanding film quality.

Initially these ups and downs were experienced by the Babelsberg film studios, which in their early days were artistically moved forward by Wolfgang Staudte. In 1951, he filmed “Man of Straw”, a famous satire based on the novel by Heinrich Mann, before turning his back on east German cinema as a result of his problems with delivering duly socialist realist celluloid. At the end of the 1950s, the Communist Party forbade close depictions of everyday life, such as the “Berlin films” by Gerhard Klein and Wolfgang Kohlhaase. In 1965, almost all productions which criticized the reality of communism were either banned or stopped. The following year the government banned Frank Beyer’s film “Traces of Stone”, which grappled furiously with the realities of the day, shortly after its premiere.

The “anti-fascist” DEFA films which took German guilt as their theme were also a way to dodge the image which filmmakers were told to paint of the day. Impressive films emerged, such as “I was nineteen” (1967), by Konrad Wolf. In the 1970s, a number of unpolished experimental films emerged, such as Egon Günther’s “The Keys”, 1974, with Heiner Carow’s “The Legend of Paul and Paula” (1973), enjoying particular success.

In 1980, Konrad Wolf, the most prominent DEFA film director, who died in 1982, presented in his film “Solo Sunny” a picture of the GDR free of illusions. Various other critical films of great artistic merit followed, (“Explorations in the March”, 1982, by Roland Gräf), but soon the film studio was virtually brought to a halt by the Party. By contrast, documentary films managed to find a realistic and poetic niche for themselves, examples being “Shuntyard” 1984, by Jürgen Böttcher, “Life in Wittstock”, 1984, by Volker Koepp, “Goodbye to Winter”, 1988, by Helke Misselwitz.

After unification in 1990, DEFA ceased production. Its studios in Babelsberg near Berlin with their longstanding tradition (which previously belonged to Ufa) have nevertheless managed the quantum leap into the future: They are presently establishing themselves as one of Europe’s leading locations for media companies and have attracted numerous firms and institutes into the area.

Over the last ten years or so, the German Pop music scene has enjoyed a tremendous surge in popularity. Before that English and American singers and bands had dominated the charts. German Pop songs, which at one time had been wildly successful, had come to appeal to only a very limited audience; home-grown Pop stars such as Udo Lindenberg were the exception.

Although they never hit the big time, however, bands such as “Tangerine Dream”, “Can” and “Kraftwerk” were pioneers in the field of electronic music and the hard rock of the “Scorpions” even made the charts in the United States. Trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, organist Barbara Dennerlein and Klaus Doldinger’s band “Passport” put the German jazz scene on the international map.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the “New German Wave” showed that German musicians could indeed achieve success with songs in their native language. Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Peter Maffay, Herbert Grönemeyer and Cologne band “BAP” established themselves as the country’s leading rock musicians. To this day their fans – like those of the punk rock groups “Die toten Hosen” and “Die Ärzte” – continue to pack stadiums and concert halls.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the German Pop scene has become increasingly diversified. Every international music trend is represented here: “Selig” picks up on grunge, “H-Blockx” plays with a crossover between rock and hip-hop, and “Jazzkantine” fuses traditional jazz with German rap. “Fury in the Slaughterhouse” and “M. Walking on the Water” take up the thread of English-language folk rock, while “Die Fantastischen Vier”, Sabrina Setlur, Xavier Naidoo and “Fettes Brot” have been successful with German-language hip-hop. The spectrum ranges from cheery Pop music by “Pur”, “Die Prinzen” and Stefan Raab, to more thought-provoking texts by “Sterne” and “Element of Crime”.

More than 300,000 people earn their living as composers, performing artists, music teachers, and as specialists in academic and government institutions, the media and the music industry. They are trained at specialized institutes: academies of music, universities, conservatories and specialized academies, schools and universities, specialized training colleges and further training academies. There are a variety of competitions to promote talented young musicians. The best-known is the Young Musicians Competition.

The work performed by public music schools, private music teachers, around 40,000 choirs, 25,000 amateur and semi-professional orchestras and other ensembles must not be underestimated. Music is a compulsory subject at general-education schools, where participation in ensembles is encouraged.

Instrument making is a crafts trade with a long tradition in Germany: musical instruments from Vogtland and especially violins from Mittenwald are world famous. Around 25 percent of young Germans play a musical instrument or sing in a choir, the most popular instruments at music schools being the piano, flute and guitar.